Current Events: "Endangered cave snail and school save each other"

 

(Tumbling Creek Cave Snail photo by Tom and Cathy Aley via The Joplin Globe)

 This piece is from The Joplin Globe, a few days ago.  It is only the size of a grain of sand, and it lives in a single location - Tumbling Creek Cave in the Ozarks of Missouri... but it saved a school.  In the 1970s, there was a population of about 15,000 of these in Tumbling Creek Cave - possibly the most biodiverse cave west of the Mississippi.  Today there may be only 150 due to all-too-common karst groundwater pollution; nutrients and pathogens from farms, and human sewage.  A major source of pollution was a failing septic system at a nearby elementary school.  Replacement of the system would have bankrupt and closed the school.  But lovers of karst ecosystems and peculiar cave fauna chipped-in to replace the system, and this saved the school, and hopefully the snail.  The great quote in the title is from Francis Salicky of the Kansas City Infozine.

See what karst lovers can do!  Now please help us save the cryptofauna beneath Gottesacker by donating.

Thanks.